A team of researchers led by the University of Arizona (UA) have discovered a grain of stardust from a neighbouring binary system of two stars. The stardust fragment is believed to have travelled to our system when one of the two stars, a so-called white dwarf, went nova. Unlike supernovae, which are the violent explosions of stars, novae are the surface eruptions of white dwarfs. The spectacular eruption ejected vas amounts of carbon ad oxygen-rich material into deep space.
Eventually, the stardust reached a region of space where our own Sun and planets would develop.
Pierre Haenecour, who led a research paper on the discovery, told Phys.org this interstellar dust represents a building block of the early solar system.
He said: “As actual dust from stars, such premolar grains give us insight into the building blocks from which our solar system formed.
“They also provide us with a direct snapshot of the conditions in a star at the time when this grain was formed.”
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And Tom Zega, from UA’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, teased humans might owe their existence to the primordial spread of stardust through the cosmos.
He said: “If we could date these objects someday, we could get a better idea of what our galaxy looked like in our region and what triggered the formation of the solar system.
“Perhaps we owe our existence to a nearby supernova explosion, compressing clouds of gas and dust with its shockwave, igniting stars and creating stellar nurseries, similar to what we see in Hubble’s famous ‘Pillars of Creation’ picture.”
The findings were published today (April 29) on the website of the journal Nature Astronomy.
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In the paper, the researchers identified the development of carbonaceous, or carbon-based, and silicate dust between 50 and 100 days after the supernova.
According to the study, novae often produce carbon and oxygen-rich dust but scientists rarely find this stardust in meteors striking the Earth.
However, a cosmic rock unearthed in Antarctica provided the researchers with enough stardust to study its origin.
The research paper reads: “Here, we report the identification of an oxygen-rich inclusion, composed of both silicate and oxide nanoparticles, inside a graphite spherule that originated in the ejecta of a low-mass carbon- and oxygen-rich nova.
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“This observation establishes laboratory evidence of the co-condensation of oxygen – and carbon-rich dust in nova outbursts and is consistent with large-scale transport and mixing of materials between chemically distinct clumps in the nova ejecta.”
After the stardust made its way to our corner of space no less than 4.5 billion years ago, it was embedded into a meteorite.
Professor Haenecour said: “Our find provides us with a glimpse into a process we could never witness on Earth.
“It tells us about how dust grains form and move around inside as they are expelled by the nova.
“We now know that the carbonaceous and silicate dust grains can form in the same nova ejecta and they get transported across chemically distinct clumps of dust within the ejecta, something that was predicted by models of novae but never found in a specimen.”